6 - Wearable and wireless gait analysis platforms: Smartphones and portable media devices

Abstract

The global biomedical and healthcare industries rely on technological advances to decrease the growing strain on limited medical resources. In particular, gait analysis facilitates the biomedical and healthcare community with a quantified assessment of a subject's rehabilitation and/or health status. The wearable accelerometer systems enable functionally autonomous evaluation of a subject's gait in his or her own environment. The advancement of the accelerometer system has transitioned from the use of tethered and data-logger approaches to robust wireless applications. The progressive evolution of the technology space has led to the testing and evaluation of wearable and wireless applications. The smartphone and portable media devices, such as the iPhone and iPod, constitute wireless accelerometer platforms capable of acquiring gait features based on the acceleration waveform. The accelerometer data can be transmitted by wireless connectivity to the Internet as an email attachment. The following chapter comprises the evolutionary pathway of accelerometer systems for the demonstration of the smartphone and portable media device as robust wearable and wireless gait analysis platforms.